It's time for Facebook users to get paid, consumer advocate Ralph Nader told CNBC on Thursday, following the upset over the social network's secret psychology experiment.
"Why don't people on Facebook start a movement ... where they say that we are going to be paid for this personal information that you are making billions of dollars from?" Nader said in an interview with "Squawk Alley."
Facebook recently revealed it had manipulated the news feeds of about 700,000 users in 2012 as part of a psychology experiment.
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"Facebook wouldn't exist without all this personal information that people give for free," said Nader, noting that access to private data is what gives the social network its "enormous growth and power."
Meanwhile, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, told the Wall Street Journal that she was sorry—not for the experiment, but for how it was "poorly communicated."
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But Nader didn't buy it.
He called the apology "pretty lame" and asked for full disclosure from Facebook on other research projects it may be conducting secretly. And he doesn't limit the request to just Facebook, but other social networks— Google and Twitter— that collect user data.
"We need a whole new relationship between the consumers of these social network companies which are making money hand-over-fist using our personal information," he said.
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—By CNBC's David Montalvo.